Brief News

Last Monday, June 30th, was "Asteroid Day," a date declared by the United Nations General Assembly in 2016, following the initiative of the Association of Space Explorers, whose members proposed a global celebration of the anniversary of the impact of the Tunguska Bolide in Siberia on June 30, 1908. So, for 10 years, we've been inspiring, engaging, and raising awareness about the risks associated with impacts with smaller bodies, particularly asteroids.
Calar Alto belongs to ESA's Planetary Defense project, so we're joining in the celebration of this day, as with our smallest telescopes, the 1.23m telescope and the Schmidt camera, we're discovering new objects while also correcting the orbits of known asteroids. We can always remember the impact of SL9 on Jupiter; Calar Alto was the first ground-based observatory to detect it (see https://www.caha.es/es/noticias/notas-de-prensa/25-aniversario-del-impacto-del-cometa-sl9-sobre-jupiter).

We have a list of interesting discoveries (of non-main-belt asteroids), including the latest in January: 2025 AO3, a new asteroid located approximately 1,810,4056 km away and not belonging to the group of potentially hazardous asteroids. This real image: https://erwinschwab.de/Z84/2018AM12/Anim2018AM12-8x8arcmin-txt.gif shows how we visualize these "nervous" companions to our Solar System. Thanks Erwin, Paco, Marco, Rainer, Dora, Maxime, Elisabeta, Detlef, Toni, Luca.... from ESA!

Calar Alto Observatory is one of the infrastructures that belong to the national map of Unique Scientific and Technical Infrastructures (Spanish acronym: ICTS), approved on November 6th, 2018, by the Science, Technology and Innovation Policy Council

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